Is there a way to make Purchase Direct Parts, when received, it does not get issued to the Job Entry, but sits at Non WIP (Raw Material or Stock)?
We often purchase direct for jobs (due to costing and allocations purposes) that will remain open for the next couple years. So the Purchase Direct Part will be sitting in the warehouse for a significant amount of time. If we do inventory count, we will have more sitting on the shelf than what is stated in Epicor (Raw Material / Stock), causing further confusion.
We also tried to use allocations, but that does not give us the benefit of true costing, and there is too much manual work on allocation and un-allocation (especially when we move inventory from one bin to another.)
There is no way to do this out-of-the-box. The Purchase Direct flag tells Epicor to completely bypass inventory on receipt, and go straight into WIP. Both cost and quantity go straight to the job in the out-of-the-box process.
It is possible you could do something like this with Project Management, with both the job and the purchase order linked to the Project, but even that would probably require some tap-dancing (not to mention a guillotine for anyone caught pilfering parts).
From the operational side, isn’t there some way you could lessen the time between part receipt at the plant and actual usage on the floor? If it’s currently that long, no system can overcome the human desire to use what’s right there.
That’s unfortunately
We do moving average costing for everything currently, and if we wish to do Purchase Direct (on Job or SO), it will bypass the moving average, and use direct cost when calculating Job / SO Cost.
However, when we look into WIP, it will show the moving average cost instead, causing an imbalance between the 2.
Not being able to use Purchase Direct is a bummer when we are purchasing mostly on Project base.
Is there any way to have WIP use 2 different costing methods?
Pur-Mtl = Direct Cost
Stk-Mtl = Moving Average
I am also thinking of Average Lot Costing to see if we can combat this issue…
It should show you the “moving average cost” as the Estimated Cost, and the PO cost as the Actual Cost.
Nothing out-of-the-box.
I think (and you should test this to be sure) that if you use Lot Average Cost you’d still have to receive the PO to stock as Lot Tracking is an Inventory functionality… and even if you can do this as soon as you issue the part to the job you’ll have the same cycle counting issue described above as long as it sits there on the shelf.
